Information Center

While Salesforce ideas allows organizations to mine the brain share of their customer and employee base, Oracle CRM On Demand Release 15 empowers sales and support personnel by consolidating information into personalized views and enabling team members to readily share that information with one another.
At the heart of R15 is a customizable home page and sidebar. The sidebar provides easy access to key portions of R15, including favorite records and lists, search, and key tasks. Also on the sidebar is the Message Center, where individuals can view any messages or comments left for them in R15. Both the sidebar and the home page can be customized through Widgets, applications that deliver custom content using RSS or HTML and require no custom coding. For example, Widgets demoed with R15 enabled access to Visual Path's eponymously named product, which scans e-mails and other company sources to develop an anonymous, companywide map of trusted relationships. Credit reporting agency Experian is a current Oracle CRM customer and is evaluating R15 for sales pipeline management. So far, the company has been impressed with the flexibility that R15's Widgets provide.

"In many cases, our lead times might be measured in months," said Nigel Hodges, head of global CRM strategies and platforms at Experian. "So, providing our sales executives with industry and company news is important for getting a sense of the client, while VisualPath would be a good way to find out network context of those clients."

The use of RSS feeds in Oracle CRM On Demand R15 and other products is important for more than just updates on the latest news.
"We have developers who work in two systems, and they don't want to log into On Demand to learn the latest project requests because it represents a third system," said Onyeka Shakur, project manager at ADP's Tax Credit Services. "Now we can just add a queue list to their desktop so they never have to log into a third system."
RSS also improves communications among members of sales teams, allowing them to receive updates made by team members on customers, projects and events.